Comparing the futures of general-purpose CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs), David Kirk told the 17th Hot Chips conference on the Stanford Univeristy campus here on Tuesday (Aug. 16) that a crisis looms in programming technology. He said this could not only blight the future CPU market but also bring an end to improvements in graphics performance despite continued improvements in GPUs......

Kirk grounded his pessimism in the experiences of game developers trying to exploit new multicore CPU chips. "We are already seeing some games limited by CPU throughput. We can render images faster than the CPU can send us the data," Kirk said. "But when game developers try to use dual-core CPUs to help, we have seen virtually no benefit to the second CPU core. And if the developer doesn't clearly understand the interactions of the cores with the caches, we have seen the application actually run slower on a dual-core machine." ......